But Did She Really Shoot a Moose: De-Mythologizing Sarah Palin

In an exellent, hard hitting op-ed in today's New York Times, Frank Rich finally dares to do what other journalists have hesitated doing - challenge the carefully crafted Sarah Palin myth.

So why the kid glove treatment by the press? Fear. The fear of being labeled something the press doesn't want to be labeled. It's a classic Karl Rove sleight of hand. Threaten the press with a label of anti-patriotism (which worked so well in the build up to the Iraq war) or sexism (how dare you criticize Sarah Palin? Don't you know she'a a woman??) and watch them back down for fear of alienating their already shrinking audience. And so far it's working well as the press has more or less failed to challenge the crucial elements of the myth (super mom, high achiever, reformer, maverick, tax cutter) .

Thanks to Frank Rich for blowing away some of the smoke.

It's a start.

Here's an excerpt. Be sure to read the whole piece here.

Op-Ed Columnist

Palin and McCain’s Shotgun Marriage

By FRANK RICH

Published: September 6, 2008
New York Times

. . . We still don’t know a lot about Palin except that she’s better at delivering a speech than McCain and that she defends her own pregnant daughter’s right to privacy even as she would have the government intrude to police the reproductive choices of all other women. Most of the rest of the biography supplied by her and the McCain camp is fiction.

• She didn’t say “no thanks” to the “Bridge to Nowhere” until after Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for $223 million in taxpayers’ money anyway.
• Far from rejecting federal pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002, 20 times the per capita average in other states).
  
• Though McCain claimed “she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities,” she has never issued a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard.
  
• As for her “executive experience” as mayor, she told her hometown paper in Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: “It’s not rocket science. It’s $6 million and 53 employees.”
  
• Her much-advertised crusade against officials abusing their office is now compromised by a bipartisan ethics investigation into charges that she did the same.

How long before we learn she never shot a moose?"